README

I used to climb in high school. Me and my friends would go to a climbing gym tucked inside of a row of abandoned buildings, step into our harnesses, dust chalk on our hands, and go on up. One fateful day, I climbed to the very top of the wall, to the final overhang, and made a hail mary leap for a handhold around the top. I knew I wouldn’t make it, but sometimes you leap anyway. As I fell, the person belaying me got his finger stuck in the belay device. I crashed to the ground. I toppled backwards and landed on my back against the corner of a bench. I left on a stretcher.

I remember my dad arriving at the hospital, wondering if I would walk. I left the hospital walking. Thank God. But years later came the chronic back pain. It started at a concert. I turned to my friend as my lower back ached and asked, doesn’t your back hurt? It spread to my upper back. It never left. I started grappling with the fact that I’d live a life of persistent, soul sapping pain. I found comfort in online communities of others living with lifelong pain. Physical therapy, yoga, foam rollers, hot and cold compresses, acupuncture. I tried it all. Years later, while stretching on a foam roller one night, I felt a tight muscle under my right armpit. I knew that I had to release it. At my next acupuncture session, I asked for a needle in precisely that spot. For the first time in years, I could raise my right arm as high as my left. The pain vanished.

One needle in exactly the right place changed everything.

The Two Globes

There are two globes on either side of my desk. One is a beautiful, mother-of-pearl-looking sphere, glistening, shiny and colorful. The other is a globe in Dark Mode. Seas of black. Earth in darkness. Which globe represents our future?

As we peer into the future, the outcome of this experiment called civilization feels bipolar. On one hand, we could live in the best version of humanity. A world where we cure cancer and Alzheimer's, make quality healthcare universally affordable, and use robotics and advanced construction techniques to create beautiful, abundant, and affordable housing. It’s a world where all children receive excellent educations, tailor-made by their personal AI, where our biggest problem is finding meaning when robots make life so easy. This all feels within reach. Just as agricultural yields have increased tenfold over the past century, we can imagine similar progress across every aspect of life that matters. A world of abundant intelligence and robotics providing an infinite supply of both mental and physical labor, giving us the wherewithal to build an infinitely better future.

Or perhaps humanity takes a darker turn. World leaders now openly warn of World War III. The Four Horsemen of the modern apocalypse wait in the wings: engineered pandemics just a CRISPR experiment away, climate catastrophes bringing drought and famine to tens of millions, conventional weapons that have already reduced entire countries to rubble, and nuclear conflict that once seemed unthinkable now threatened with alarming casualness. Add to this the risks from artificial intelligence systems, which is no longer science fiction but an emerging reality, and our capacity for self-destruction has never been greater.

The AI Doc's subtitle says it all: "How I learned to become an Apocaloptimist". It feels like we somehow live in both apocalyptic times and times that warrant incredible optimism. Which one will it be? Bright or bleak? Promise or peril? The truth will never be one or the other. Black or white. It will surely be a grey in between. But what does it take to make sure that the world is sunnier than it is grey? Happier, more prosperous, more peaceful, more equal, more like the bright, shiny globe than the dark one?

Our world, like our bodies, is an interconnected system. Pull on one part and pathologies, or cures, appear elsewhere. In this complex system that we call civilization, what spot might unlock a disproportionately better future? The stakes of finding this point may determine whether humanity lives with chronic pain or finds its way back to vitality. If we look back fifty years from now and it all went well, what did we get right? If we can find that answer, we can fight for it as if the future of the world depended on it. Because it does.

Complex systems rarely have single solutions. I continue to care for my back with yoga and acupuncture and running. But if I ask myself where to focus my limited time on this earth, I must ask: where would I place the needle?

Where would you place it?

Becoming Endless

In December of 2010 I had an idea that became the domino that set in motion my life today. I was on a Stanford trip to India and realized that smartphones were going to sweep across emerging markets, into the hands of a billion people. That computers were not going to die, despite the oft-quoted "death of the PC." And that they were going to remain the most powerful tool of the workforce and therefore also the most powerful tool to prepare people for the knowledge economy jobs. All of these came true. The idea was simple. If everyone in emerging markets has a TV and is about to have a smartphone, you could plug their phones into the TV, add a keyboard, and you could turn their phone into the processor to make a computer for free. It’s funny, this is the only one that didn’t actually happen.

Instead we built an operating system to make that possible. It is an OS that is as simple as a phone, can run on any hardware, can be unlocked with financing payments, and is full of educational content. It is both safe from the scary stuff on the internet and also wildly useful in the far reaches of the world, so that anyone can use it to lift themselves up from poverty even if they don’t have access to the internet. We called it Endless OS. We designed it to be the best educational operating system in the world. And then the company died.

I am the person who learned the most from Endless OS. I learned how software is built, the sort of software with the complexity of operating systems. I learned how to build hardware. How distribution channels work. How school systems and government ministries operate. And how most of today's tech-fluent techies got their start. I learned the clues that set me on the mission that I am on today. I learned most of what you will find in this book. Most importantly, that little idea in 2010 set in motion all of the dominoes that became my life today, including my second mission, the topic of this book.

As we built and deployed an operating system that could educate millions of young people, the question that never left my mind was, how do we teach them once they have the tool? How do we teach them to thrive in the highest paying jobs that people pay global wages for?

How do we teach them to thrive in the modern world?

Solutions

While many books describe problems with very little in the way of solutions, this book is the inverse. It is about solutions. About action. The lessons of this book weren't read in books or theorized in conference rooms. They were learned on the ground, close to the people using our products. Last night I saw a magazine with a picture of a woman in a favela in Rio. I could tell you exactly where she probably was in that favela. I have spent so many years talking to users in it. I learned by building and deploying. By reading and talking, yes, but also by walking the streets of the world and ideating, and building what was born out of those walks. By trying, failing, iterating, trying again, and discovering.

This book is my attempt to share what I learned on the trail. The clues and our conclusions. We have spent a lot of time on this mountain. We have gotten lost. We have found the trail. We have learned the terrain. This book began as an attempt to share what we have gleaned so that you might be able to take it and use it to solve these challenges in your own ways. I know what it took for us to learn what we have. I know how unlikely it is that someone else will discover many of these insights, which is why I feel compelled to share them with you.

As I began writing, I found myself needing to understand the historical grounding to understand if these solutions really mattered as much as I believed they did. What I found was fascinating. It helped me make sense of the world that we live in today. As Disraeli said, "The best way to become acquainted with a subject is to write a book about it." So I did that. The book started as a few blog posts exploring the Printing Press and Industrial Revolution. As I began researching each chapter, one chapter would split into two separate chapters. Each of those chapters would, in turn, evolve into two more. Like a baby growing from the splitting of cells, this book was born. The result is the book in your hands.

In Dream Big, the book about Jorge Paulo Lemann, Marcel Telles, and Beto Sicupira, who bought Anheuser-Busch, Burger King, and Heinz, it talks about their saying that "Having a big dream takes the same amount of energy as having a small dream. So dream big." So we will do that. We will dream of the best possible future and find the way to make it so.

How To Read This Book

The book is organized into three acts. Some chapters are historical. Some are philosophical. Some are personal. Some are about education, technology, economics, or the work of Endless. They are meant to fit together, but they are also meant to be read in pieces. Skim it. Skip around. Find what's interesting to you and jump to it.

To help you do that, let’s go into the three acts:

Act I is an exploration of the stakes. It is a view through time, peering both back in history and forward into the future, to help us understand the world that we will grow old in. It looks for clues that can teach us what will happen in the future or, rather, what can happen if we make the right decisions today. It is more about understanding what the world looks like if we educate our young people than it is prophesy. It is about causality. About pinpointing what decides the answer to which globe we get to live in. Read it because it is important. Also read it because it is enjoyable. I hope you will find it as fascinating as I did.

Act II is a scavenger hunt through the world looking for clues about how we might do it. There are 3 billion people under the age of 25 years old. If we must teach them all to be fluent in the technologies of our era, at that scale, what clues can we turn to for answers about how to do that? What truths can serve as the foundational pillars for us to lean on? Each of us might put those puzzle pieces together in different ways, but at least we can look at the pieces that we have to build with. Let's call these Principles. First Principles. Principles for building a better world.

Act III is our solution. Our roadmap. Precise. Concrete. It shows you what we at Endless do. I write it for three reasons. First, because I believe this is the best way to put the principles together into one cohesive solution. Of course I do, which is why we are doing it. Second, because I could be wrong. The problem is bigger than any one solution. If I am wrong, learn from what we are doing and build a better solution. Compete with us. Beat us. Please. Finally, I am writing this because, if we are right, by definition we cannot do it alone. The solution is the community. That, more than anything, is why I am writing this book. We need you to make it happen.

I have been scribbling this for several years, in fragments, at the edges of running Endless. I have persisted because it matters. My children are going to grow up. We all are. And in a few decades, we will live in the world we build today. The question is, what world will it be and will we have done everything in our power to make it the one that we want to live in?

If you feel that we are right, join us. Because our solution only matters when enough people come together to make it a reality.

Let's go find the place to put the needle.

Matt